walking upstream…
Robert Wyatt
photo: bryan ledgard · cc by 2.0 ↗Robert Wyatt
Robert Wyatt co-founded the Canterbury scene's Soft Machine as a teenage drummer steeped in modern jazz, singing and playing with a loose, conversational feel borrowed from the big-band and bebop records his father had introduced him to. A fall from a window in 1973 left him paralyzed from the waist down and ended his career as a drummer, but it also pushed him toward the hushed, unhurried solo records — beginning with Rock Bottom (1974) — that would define the rest of his career, including his best-known single, a devastating recording of "Shipbuilding."
the sound in question
1982
ShipbuildingRobert Wyatt
walk the tributaries ↓
Charles Mingus1950s · Jazz / Post-bop
Wyatt has cited Charles Mingus's mid-century big bands as a model for how a group should sound — "I wouldn't have minded working with" the classic Mingus quintets, he's said — prizing Mingus's loose, argumentative ensemble writing and refusal to let a piece settle into one groove, qualities that carried into Soft Machine's own knotty arrangements and Wyatt's later solo records.
listen: upstream & here
1960
Original Faubus FablesCharles Mingus
1974
Sea SongRobert Wyatt
listen forThe lurching tempo changes and combative call-and-response vocals of "Original Faubus Fables" — Mingus and drummer Dannie Richmond trading barbed lines against a band that keeps threatening to fall apart — echo in the way Wyatt's "Sea Song" keeps sliding unpredictably between meters and moods, never settling into a fixed groove.
Duke Ellington1930s–40s · Jazz / Big band
Wyatt has pointed to Duke Ellington's orchestra as proof a band could function as a cast of distinct characters rather than an anonymous backing group — "everyone in the band had a character," he's said of Ellington's writing for specific soloists — an idea he carried into his own richly arranged, individually voiced solo records.
listen: upstream & here
1941
Take the A TrainDuke Ellington
1980
At Last I Am FreeRobert Wyatt
listen forThe warm, unmistakably personal reed-and-brass voicings that give "Take the A Train" its color reappear, scaled down to a bedroom studio, in the tender multi-tracked horns and keyboards wrapped around Wyatt's own aching recording of "At Last I Am Free."
John Coltrane1960s · Jazz / Modal jazz / Spiritual jazz
The Coltrane quartet's extended, modal recordings — "My Favorite Things" chief among them — were reportedly among Soft Machine's most powerful early influences, feeding the band's taste for long, exploratory forms that build hypnotically rather than resolving on the beat; that patience for slow-building, modal drift stayed with Wyatt long after he left the group.
listen: upstream & here
1961
My Favorite ThingsJohn Coltrane
1997
Free Will and TestamentRobert Wyatt
listen forThe way Coltrane's soprano sax circles and intensifies over the same repeating vamp for minutes on "My Favorite Things," building tension without changing the chords, anticipates the slow-burning, incantatory build of Wyatt's own extended piece "Free Will and Testament."